Girls Against Boys – The Ghost List

Let’s talk cool, baby. Real fuck cool. Denim jackets and dime shades and gin splints, neat for the win. Dead crooners tattooed on copper prostitutes. Pulp flint and the narcotic codex. A cigarette cut through the greasy air of success, sucked deep and deserving through a split lip and crackling teeth down the grey rumble streets of a wet criminal dream.

Let’s talk Girls Against Boys.

The double bass expansion unit. The Bulletproof Cupids. The Sex Players (survived). The Sexy Sams. The reasons why, whenever I try and conceive me and Ms. Mitzi’s exodus from the cash grab, shit trap of new day, dead doe city, I always end on “goddamn” and get back to tripping that grim fantastic again.

Because Girls Against Boys is the sound of the New York I call home and have been – consistently – since Venus Luxure Baby.

Sure, they took some time to disappear after the slick misfortune of 1998’s Freak*on*ica and the brief return form of 2002’s You Can’t Fight What You Can’t See (which I never really gave the time of day) and in that twelve years a whole helluva lot’s changed here in gotham for the worse while the band went on to make Obits and Akashic Books (who should really publish Skin Slips) and New Wet Kojak and Paramount Styles and have kids and perform all other manner of notable endeavors worthy of a bad luck Kennedy Center but last September they returned with The Ghost List (yeah, we’re late to the party but this all needs saying). It’s an EP put out on Epitonic (whose resurgence is a gift for frothing miscreants in and of itself) and – at just five songs deep – is the most exhilarating piece of junk town, groove haze pleasure swinging I’ve heard since…shit…”Click Click”?

See the thing about Girls Against Boys is there isn’t a single fucking band that sounds like them. Not that any bands have tried (that double bass, man…that McCloud beat swoon) and if they have, nobody’s noticed because you just can’t fuck with this sound. Meat thick machismo played grit slick with a wink, a thud, a synth and the ruddy promise that tomorrow might be better but tonight is what we’ve earned. No bullshit rhythm and blues whose cool is so effortless and permanent as to make The Ghost List buck the sad sack soullessness of so many reunion records (I’m looking at you Pixies and your bullshit EP “series”) and nestle right in with the canon, dry martini in hand, smoke in the try and a lady of ill-repute on the way.

The Ghost List Tracklist:

1. It’s a Diamond Life
2. Fade Out
3. 60 Is Greater Than 15
4. Let’s Get Killed
5. Kick

Girls Against Boys - The Ghost List, reviewed by Charles on 2014-01-13T15:30:33+00:00 rating 3.8 out of 5